TRENDSPOTTING: Increase Sales Using These 3 Helpful Tips
As the year end draws near, many businesses are faced with two things–annual sales reviews and forecasting meetings. It’s easy to get lost in the pile of metrics and analyses, which can make even the most analytically minded planners get sleepy eyed. To easily increase sales, consider focusing on trends in your business and creating stories around their meaning. Here are few ways to do that:
#1 DEVELOP AND OPTIMIZE YOUR MOBILE APP
Beacon technology is coming on strong in many industries. Its location based applications allow consumers to receive targeted messages about products, businesses and reviews on their mobile devices when in close range of a bluetooth low energy (BLE) signal. This hyper-local information can provide details on sales promotions, restaurant menus, and even updates to property listings. By taking advantage of value-added messaging through branded mobile apps, you create multiple avenues of engagement within your market and thereby open the opportunity for further segmentation of your customers. For example, in the commercial real estate industry, prospective tenants can explore available real estate in the neighborhood of their choice without having to setup an appointment with a broker.
#2 UNDERSTAND YOUR PHYSICAL SPACE
Path tracking plays an important role in not only measuring how quickly customers get to the products they seek, but also the directions they take to find them. If you operate a retail store, this principle helps justify whether or not a layout of displays or aisles works well. In a larger space, such as a shopping center, knowing where people head after they leave a parking structure can help you evaluate a property’s most used access points or to adjust the lease rates of vacancies in highly trafficked zones.
#3 TAKE STEPS TO MEASURE DWELL TIME
If time is money, you can reasonably assume that getting customers to spend more time at a designated area will inevitably increase sales. Start by establishing a baseline measure of how many vehicles or pedestrians pass by your property. Doing so allows you to compare that number with the amount of people or cars that come inside your location. Creating captivating window displays, such as the San Francisco SPCA Holiday Windows, is a great way to encourage pedestrians to stop and observe products longer. Tools that measure dwell time can also help describe how long people spend in a defined area of interest and can gage the need to improve customer service. Once customers walk inside a business, knowledgeable and helpful sales staff are a huge motivator for shoppers to stay longer and ultimately come back to your storefront. From a budget perspective, this data sheds light on how many associates need to be hired in order to handle sales traffic in various zones.
For more applications and steps towards identifying trends in your business, reach out to me and schedule a live demo.